Snowflakes on the Sea

by Linda Lael Miller

  Nathan groaned, but he remembered her thinness, her collapse on the set in Seattle, the hollow ache visible in her green eyes. And he turned away, as if in anger, and ignored her until she withdrew.

  2

  The telephone was ringing when Mallory awakened the next morning. She burrowed down under the covers with a groan, determined to ignore it. If she waited long enough, Nathan would answer it or the caller would give up.

  But the ringing continued mercilessly, and Mallory realized that her husband wasn’t nestled between the smooth flannel sheets with her. Tossing back the bedclothes with a cry of mingled irritation and disappointment, she scrambled out of bed and reached automatically for her robe.

  The house was pleasantly warm, and Mallory smiled, leaving the robe—and an aching recollection of Nathan’s rejection the night before—behind as she made her way into the kitchen and disengaged the old-fashioned earpiece from its hook on the side of the telephone. “Hello?” she spoke into the mouthpiece, idly scanning the neat kitchen for signs of Nathan. Except for the heat radiating from the big woodburning stove, there was nothing to indicate that he’d been around at all.

  “Hello,” snapped Diane Vincent, Nathan’s press agent. “Is Nate there?”

  Mallory frowned. Good question, she thought ruefully. And where the hell do you get off calling him “Nate”?

  “Mallory?” Diane prodded.

  “He was here,” Mallory answered, and hated herself for sounding so lame and uncertain.

  Disdain crackled in Diane’s voice. “One night stopover, huh? Listen, if he happens to get in touch, tell him to call me. I’m staying at my sister’s place in Settle. He knows the number.”

  Mallory was seething, and her knees felt weak. She reached out awkwardly for one of the kitchen chairs, drew it near and sat down. She despised Diane Vincent and, in some ways, even feared her. But she wasn’t about to let anything show. “I’ll relay your message,” she said evenly.

  Diane sighed in irritation, and Mallory knew that she was wondering why a dynamic, vital man like Nathan McKendrick had to have such a sappy wife. “You do that, sugarplum—it’s important.”

  Mallory forced a smile to her face. “Oh, I’m sure it is—dearest.”

  Diane hung up.

  Outside, in the pristine stillness of an island morning, Cinnamon’s joyful bark pierced the air. Mallory hung up the phone and went to stand at the window over the kitchen sink, a genuine smile displacing the frozen one she’d assumed for Diane Vincent. Nathan and the enormous red dog were frolicking in the snow, their breath forming silvery white plumes in the crisp chill of the day. Beyond them, the towering pine trees edging the unpaved driveway swayed softly in the wind, green and snow-burdened against the splotchy sky.

  Mallory swallowed as bittersweet memories flooded her mind. For a moment, she slid back through the blurry channels of time to a cheerful memory….

  “One of these days,” her father was saying, snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his checkered wool coat and water pooling on the freshly waxed floor around his feet, “I’m going to have to fell those pine trees, Janet, whether you and Mallory like it or not. If I don’t, one of them is sure to come down in a windstorm and crash right through the roof of this house.”

  Mallory and her mother had only exchanged smiles, knowing that Paul O’Connor would never destroy those magnificent trees. They had already been giants when the island was settled, over a hundred years before, and that made them honored elders.

  With reluctance, Mallory wrenched herself back to the eternal present and retreated into the bedroom. There would be time enough to tell Nathan that Diane wanted him to call, she thought, with uncharacteristic malice. Time enough.

  Mallory crawled into bed, yawned and immediately sank into a sweet, sound, dreamless sleep.

  When she awakened much later, the sun was high in the sky, and she could hear the sizzle of bacon frying and the low, caressing timbre of Nathan’s magical voice. Grinning, buoyed by the sounds and scents of morning, Mallory slid out of bed and crept to the kitchen doorway.

  Nathan, clad in battered blue jeans and a bulky blue pullover sweater, stood with his back to her, the telephone’s earpiece propped precariously between his shoulder and his ear. While he listened to the person on the other end of the line, he was trying to turn the fragrant bacon and keep an eager Cinnamon at bay at the same time. Finally, using a meat fork, he lifted one crispy strip from the pan, allowed the hot fat to drip off and then let the morsel fall to the floor. “Careful, girl—that’s hot,” he muttered. And then he moved closer to the mouthpiece and snapped, “Very funny, Diane. I was talking to the dog.”

  Mallory stiffened. Suddenly, the peace, beauty and comfort of the day were gone. It was as though the island had been invaded by a hostile army.

  She went back to the bedroom, now chilled despite the glowing warmth that filled the old house, and took brown corduroy slacks and a wooly white sweater from her suitcases. After dressing and generally making herself presentable, she again ventured into enemy territory.

  Nathan was setting the table with Blue Willow dishes and everyday silver and humming one of his own tunes as he worked. Mallory looked at the dishes and remembered the grace of her mother’s hands as she’d performed the same task, the lilting softness of the songs she’d sung.

  Missing both her parents keenly in that moment, she shut her eyes tight against the memory of their tragic deaths. She had so nearly died with them that terrible day, and she shuddered as her mind replayed the sound of splintering wood, the dreadful chill and smothering silence of the water closing over her face, the crippling fear.

  “Mall?” Nathan queried in a low voice. “Babe?”

  She forced herself to open her eyes, draw a deep, restorative breath. Janet and Paul O’Connor were gone, and there was no sense in reliving the brutal loss now. She tried to smile and failed miserably.

  “Breakfast smells good,” she said.

  Nathan could be very perceptive at times—it was a part, Mallory believed, of his mystique as a superstar. The quality came through in the songs he wrote and in the haunting way he sang them. “Could it be,” he began, raising one dark eyebrow and watching his wife with a sort of restrained sympathy, “that there are a few gentle and beloved ghosts among us this morning?”

  Mallory nodded quickly and swallowed the tears that had been much too close to the surface of late. The horror of that boating accident, taking place only a few months after her marriage to Nathan, flashed through her mind once more in glaring technicolor. The Coast Guard had pulled her, unconscious, from the water, but it had been too late for Paul and Janet O’Connor.

  Nathan moved to stand behind her, his hands solid and strong on her shoulders. It almost seemed that he was trying to draw the pain out of her spirit and into his own.

  Mallory lifted her chin. “What did Diane want?” she asked, deliberately giving the words a sharp edge. If she didn’t distract Nathan somehow, she would end up dissolving before his very eyes, just as she’d done so many times during the wretched, agonizing days following the accident.

  He sighed and released his soothing hold on her shoulders, then rounded the table and sank into his own chair, reaching out for the platter of fried bacon. “Nothing important,” he said, dropping another slice of the succulent meat into Cinnamon’s gaping mouth.

  Mallory began to fill her own plate with the bacon, eggs and toast Nathan had prepared. “Diane is beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Nathan glowered. “She’s a bitch,” he said flatly.

  Mallory heartily agreed, in secret, of course, and it seemed wise to change the subject. “My contract with the soap is almost up,” she ventured carefully, longing for a response she knew Nathan wouldn’t give.

  “Hmm,” he said, taking an irritating interest in the view framed by the big window over the sink. The dwarf cherry trees in the yard looked as though someone had trimmed their naked gray branches in glistening white lace.

&nb
sp; Mallory bit into a slice of bacon, annoyed. Damn him, why doesn’t he say that he’s pleased to know I’ll have time for him again, that we should have a child now? “Well?” she snapped.

  “Well, what?” he muttered, still avoiding her eyes.

  Mallory ached inside. If she told him that she wanted to give up her career—it wasn’t even a career to her, really, but something she had stumbled into—it would seem that she was groveling, that she hadn’t been able to maintain her independence. “Nothing,” she replied with a defeated sigh. She looked at the food spread out on the table and suddenly realized that the makings of such a meal hadn’t been on hand when she arrived the night before. “You’ve been to the store.”

  He laughed at this astute observation, and at last he allowed his dark, brooding eyes to make contact with her green ones. “My dear,” he imparted loftily, “some of us don’t lounge about in our beds half the day with absolutely no concern for the nutritional needs of the human body. Which reminds me—” His wooden chair scraped along the floor as he stood up and reached out for a bulky paper bag resting on the kitchen counter. From it, he took six enormous bottles containing vitamin supplements. Ignoring his own rapidly cooling breakfast, Nathan began to shake pills from each of the bottles and place them neatly beside Mallory’s orange juice. Finally, when there was a colorful mountain of capsules and tablets sitting on the tablecloth, he commanded sternly, “Start swallowing.”

  Mallory gulped, eyeing what amounted to a small meal all on its own. “But—”

  Nathan merely leaned forward and raised his eyebrows in firm instruction, daring her to defy him.

  Dutifully, his wife swallowed the vitamins, one by one. When the arduous task had been completed, Mallory had no appetite left for the food remaining on her plate, but she ate it anyway. Clearly Nathan meant to press the point if she didn’t.

  Once the meal was over, they washed and dried the dishes together, talking cautiously about things that didn’t matter. As Mallory put the last piece of silverware into the appropriate drawer, however, she bluntly asked a question that had been tormenting her all along.

  “Nathan, why didn’t you make love to me last night?”

  He looked at her, and their eyes held for a moment, but Mallory saw the hardening of Nathan’s jawline and the tightening of his fine lips. He broke away from her gaze and once again took a consuming interest in the cherry trees outside.

  “I was tired,” he said after a long pause. “Jet lag, I guess.”

  Mallory was not sure whether what she felt was courage or just plain foolishness. “Are you having an affair, Nathan?”

  He whirled, all his attention suddenly focused on Mallory’s face. “No,” he bit out, plainly insulted at the suggestion. “And in case you’re wondering, I still find you as desirable as ever, last night notwithstanding, even if you are a touch too bony for my taste.”

  “Then what is it?” Mallory pressed, crumpling the damp dish towel between her hands. “We haven’t been together in six weeks and—”

  Nathan pried the cloth out of her hands, tossed it aside and drew Mallory very close. The encounter of their two bodies, his, hard and commanding, hers, gently rounded and very willing, set off an intangible, electric response in them both. “You don’t need to remind me how long we’ve been apart, pumpkin,” he muttered, his lips warm and soft at her temple. “This last tour was torture.”

  Mallory throbbed with the dreadful, ancient need of him. “Make love to me now, Nathan,” she whispered.

  But he stiffened and held her away, and the only contact remaining was the weight of his hands on her shoulders. “No,” he said firmly. “You’re tired and sick…. I don’t know what your doctor’s orders were, but I’m sure they didn’t include a sexual marathon.”

  Mallory’s chin trembled slightly. Was he really concerned for her health? Or was he fulfilling his needs in someone else’s bed? He’d denied having an affair, but it didn’t seem likely that he would admit to anything of that sort when he knew his wife had been hospitalized only a few days before.

  Taking no apparent notice of her silence, Nathan kissed Mallory’s forehead in a brotherly manner and released his hold on her shoulders. “There’s a nice fire going in the living room,” he said, sounding determinedly cheerful. “Why don’t you curl up on the couch and read or something?”

  Mallory had several “or somethings” in mind for the living room sofa, but they certainly didn’t include reading. With a proud lift of her chin, she turned and marched out of the kitchen without a word.

  The living room was a warm and welcoming place, however, with its window seats and sweeping view of Puget Sound. Mallory couldn’t help feeling soothed as she entered. She stood still for a long time, looking out at the water and the snowy orchard that had been her father’s pride. When he wasn’t piloting or repairing his charter fishing boat, Paul O’Connor had spent every free moment among those trees, pruning and spraying and rejoicing in the sweet fruit they bore.

  Presently, the snow began to fall again. Mallory took a childlike pleasure in the beauty of it, longing to rush outside and catch the huge, iridescent flakes on her tongue. Too tired for the moment to pursue the yearning, she perched instead on a window seat, her knees sinking deep in its bright polka-dot cushions, and let her forehead rest against the cool dampness of the window glass.

  She sensed Nathan’s presence long before he approached to stand behind her, disturbingly close.

  “I’ve got some business to take care of, pumpkin,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back later.”

  Mallory’s shoulders tensed painfully, and she did not turn around to look at her husband. She had a pretty good idea of what kind of “business” he had in mind, but she would have died before calling him on it. If she was losing her husband, she could at least lose him with dignity and grace.

  But she was entirely unprepared for the warm, moving touch of his lips on the side of her neck. A shiver of delightful passion went through her, and she was about to turn all her concentration on seducing Nathan then and there when he suddenly turned and strode out of the room.

  Mallory closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until she’d heard the distant click of the back door closing behind him. She cried silently for several minutes, and then marched into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face until the tears had been banished.

  On the back porch, Mallory exchanged her sneakers for sturdy boots and pulled on one of the oversize woolen coats that hung on pegs along the inside wall. The garment was heavy, and it smelled comfortingly of pine sap, salt water and tobacco. Wearing it brought her father so near that Mallory almost thought she might turn around and see him standing in the doorway, grinning his infectious grin.

  Outside, the tracks in the deep, crusted snow indicated that Nathan had brought his Porsche to the island the night before. The car was gone now, and so was Cinnamon.

  Mallory crammed her gloveless hands into the pockets of her father’s coat and frowned. “Rat fink dog,” she muttered.

  A stiff wind was blowing in from the Sound, churning the lazy flakes of snow that were still falling in furious white swirls. Mallory turned her back to the wind and started toward the wooded area that was the center of the island.

  Here, there were towering pine trees, and more of the Douglas fir that lined Mallory’s driveway, but there were cedars and elms and madronas, too. Under the ever-thickening pelt of snow, she knew, were the primitive wild ferns, with their big, scalloped fronds.

  Privately, Mallory thought that the ferns were remnants of the murky time before the great ice age, when the area might well have been a jungle. It was easy to picture dinosaurs and other vanished beasts munching on the plants while volcanoes erupted angrily in the background.

  Mallory marched on. The mountains were minding their manners now, with the exception of one, but who knew when they might awaken again, alive with fiery violence? Unnerved by Mount Saint Helens, many scientists were pondering Mount Rai
nier now, along with the rest of the Cascade range.

  As Mallory made her way through the thick underbrush, a blackberry vine caught at her sleeve, eliciting from her a small gasp of irritation and then a reluctant smile. How many times had she ventured here as a child, armed with an empty coffee can or a shortening tin, to pluck the tart late-summer berries from their wicked, thorny bushes?

  The thought made Mallory miss her mother desperately, and she hurried on. The motion did nothing, though, to allay the loneliness she felt, or banish persistent memories of Janet’s warm praise at the gathering of “so many very, very fine blackberries.” After the fruit had been thoroughly washed under cold water, Mallory’s mother had cooked jams and jellies and mouth-watering pies.

  At last, Mallory emerged on the other side of the island’s dense green yoke, and Kate Sheridan’s A-frame house came into view. She should have called before dropping in on this busy woman who had been her mother’s dearest friend for so many years, she realized, but it was too late to consider manners now. Kate was standing on the deck at the back of the house, smiling as she watched Mallory’s approach.

  She waved in her exuberant fashion, this trim, sturdy woman, and called out, “I knew I was right to wrench myself away from that wretched typewriter and brew some coffee!”

  Mallory was warmed by this enthusiastic greeting, but she was chagrined, too. Kate Sheridan was the author of a series of children’s mystery novels, all set in the Puget Sound area, and her time was valuable indeed. Pausing at the base of the snowy path, Mallory deliberated. “I could come back another time,” she offered.

  “Nonsense!” Kate cried, beaming. “I wouldn’t dream of letting an interesting guest like you escape. But I warn you, Mallory—I intend to pump you for information about the things that nasty character you play is planning!”

  Mallory assumed a stubborn look as she tromped up the wooden stairway leading to Kate’s deck, but she knew that her eyes were sparkling. Her friend’s undisguised interest in the plot line of the soap opera amused her deeply.

  “My lips are sealed,” Mallory said with appropriate drama, knowing all the while that she would tell Kate everything if pressed.